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If you follow the discussion around IT organizations in general, you have most definitely heard a number of times how IT should be aligned with business, improve business processes, support strategic initiatives etc. Those statements are undeniably true. But the hard part is the question that follows: “How am I supposed to achieve this?”
Making sure that you are doing the right things starts by managing demands and IT portfolio.
What does this mean?
Step 1: Evaluate all initiatives, opportunities, ideas and/or demands against the same criteria:
- How well does this demand support our company objectives?
- How does this demand improve business processes?
- How much direct value is this going to bring us?
- How much is this going to cost us?
- What resources are needed to implement this?
Step 2: Start projects that bring the most value for the money, forget the rest!
Step 3: Evaluate your current projects regularly: the project portfolio.
- Evaluate regularly the situation of your projects
- Kill projects that are not in line with business objectives anymore
- Verify that critical projects are on a successful path
Step 4: Manage the currently provided services: the service portfolio
- What services are we providing today?
- What strategic objectives do those services support?
- What business processes do those services support?
- What value do those services bring to business today?
- How much does it cost to provide those services?
- Kill services that don’t provide enough value for the money.
Let’s look at an example. There are three demands coming from the business:
- We need better tools for our sales personnel so that they don’t have to spend so much time writing offers, contracts, purchase orders etc. with similar content
- We need a videoconference system so that we can train our foreign country units in a more efficient way
- We have employee satisfaction as one of our major enablers for success. At the moment, we have too many problems with networks and standard IT services, and it has a negative impact on the employee satisfaction.
Now you need to evaluate all those requests using the same criteria. You need feedback from business people to get accurate information to be used in decision making. Those examples all serve a different purpose, each bringing value. Still, some bring more than others. Getting this right is where you start winning the most!
IT can also be an active innovator and take part in developing business processes. But that’s another story, and I’ll delve into that in a future blog.
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